Although it wasn’t delivered with a big guffaw, a day after the surprising/confounding loss to the Nuggets in Game 2 of the NBA Western Conference finals, Kobe Bryant was able to find some humor in all the drama that has engulfed the Los Angeles Lakers like a deep fog rolling off the Pacific.

“It’s funny,” Bryant said Friday afternoon. “Game 2 comes down to some plays down the stretch, some calls here and there — now it’s like we have to reinvent the wheel. We’ll just do what we do.”

But to some, “doing what they do” is the blessing and the curse for Los Angeles. As 65 regular-season wins and the conference’s top-seed would attest, the Lakers are obviously a talented team. Everybody knows that including it seems, Los Angeles’ players. So while they’re capable of dominating teams, as was the case in a 40-point rout of Houston in Game 5 of the conference semifinals, they’re also capable of a sense of superiority or entitlement that costs them games — as was the case in Game 6 of that series.

It might have been considered promising, that, after a practice and film sessions that lasted more than 2 1/2 hours, the Lakers acknowledged that with the series against Denver tied at 1 and moving to Colorado and the Pepsi Center, where the Nuggets haven’t lost since early March, it was incumbent upon them to make some adjustments.

“It’s on us,” Bryant said. “It’s always the team that loses that makes the adjustments. It’s kind of a back-and-forth thing.”

But it was the Lakers who were making changes even after winning Game 1. Dismayed that Nene, Kenyon Martin and Chris Andersen were at least as good as their big men in the contest, Los Angeles emphasized going inside for Game 2. That strategy seemed to be more than a little effective; the Lakers had 10 second-chance points and 36 points in the paint at halftime.

But even though center Pau Gasol finished the game with 17 points and 17 rebounds, and small forward Trevor Ariza had 20 points, somehow the emphasis on exploiting what was thought to be a resounding Los Angeles advantage entering the series seemed to fizzle.

Afterward, more than one Lakers player said the team stopped executing its offense; one could make a counterargument that Denver took it away from L.A. — in either case it doesn’t bode well because that might expose the biggest crack in the team’s façade.

Apart from Bryant, who does most of the work on the floor, and Jackson, who is the larger-than-life figure off of it, the reality is that the Lakers don’t have a whole lot else when it comes to championship pedigree. There is guard Derek Fisher, who has won titles with the team and is a steady voice in the locker room, but he’s enmeshed in a horrendous shooting slump, shooting less than 34 percent from the field in the postseason.

The Lakers’ two other brightest lights, Gasol and Lamar Odom, were with L.A. when it lost to Boston in last season’s Finals, but that series raised questions about the team’s toughness. Those queries were supposed to be answered this time around, but whether it was faltering against Houston, or blowing a 14-point lead, as was the case Thursday night, it’s safe to say there’s more than a little uneasiness remaining.

Throughout the playoffs, Jackson hasn’t been hesitant to publicly call out players who haven’t measured up in his eyes, using his postgame news conference Thursday to single out point guards Fisher, Jordan Farmar and Sasha Vujacic. On Friday, though, Jackson tried a more holistic approach.

“We’re OK,” Jackson said. “They won, but these were both very close games — it’s not like the bottom fell out of the ocean just because we lost this ballgame.”

Special correspondent Elliot Teaford contributed to this story.
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com

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